Journal of Krishi Vigyan

A study was conducted among two hundred and forty five tree growers of Tamil Nadu state in India to assess the functioning of Tree Grower Societies (TGS) and to predict the willingness of farmer to join TGS. It was observed that majority of the respondents were not aware of the existence of TGS, neither enrolled as member nor paid membership fees. Regarding the perceptions about the benefits of participation in TGS, majority of the respondents shown positive response to know the market information of tree produces, technical information on tree growing, to meet fellow farmers and interacted with them and to avoid interference of middleman in selling their forest produce. The constraints expressed by respondents in the functioning of TGS were, lack of infrastructure facilities like office space, furniture, staff, members did not have adequate knowledge to run the society, non availability of time to attend society meetings and sizeable number of respondents felt domination of few members in the societies. Logistic regression results revealed that, if a tree grower had high perception towards forestry extension activities, the odds of his willingness to become member of TGS would increase by a factor of 17.58 units. In other words, the willingness of a tree grower to become member of TGS improves by 17 times if he had high perception towards forestry extension activities.